


nothing remains the same

by raffinit



Category: The Last of Us
Genre: Angst, F/M, Tess Lives AU, Tess comes back but we don't know how
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-04-29
Updated: 2017-05-08
Packaged: 2018-10-25 06:44:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,131
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10758867
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/raffinit/pseuds/raffinit
Summary: Tess is alive.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This is a 2-part dram-o-rama featuring the classic AU spiel of Tess surviving. I'm spitting out some weak shit before my surgery because I'll be too doped on drugs for a bit to write

He didn’t understand why at first.

Not after that first day, when he’d first swept her up into his arms and crushed her against his chest as if she might’ve slipped through his fingers if he held her any gentler. How he’d tilted his head down to kiss her, take her lips for his and remember the taste of them, the feel of them against his, but Tess had turned her face, buried it into his neck instead. He hadn’t thought about it then, caught up in the fact that she was  _ alive, _ she was here, she was  _ safe _ . 

He tried to touch her that night; pressed up behind her and hands caressing the too-thin curve of her hips, the jut of her hipbone sharp against his palm. Tess had curled into the covers, murmured something like an apology and touched his face, promised him  _ tomorrow _ \- “‘s been a long day, big guy. We should get some rest.”

And the next morning he had woken to her hands wrapped around his cock, working him in all the ways she knew he liked it. When he’d reached for her, mumbling with sleep and urgent need, she had only reached for his hand, pressing a soft kiss against his knuckles before she pulled a dizzying orgasm from him. 

He’d tried to return the favor, but Tess had pulled away from his seeking hands and lips like he’d burned her. 

Joel frowned. “‘s wrong? I won’t hurt ya -”

“It’s fine,” she said, voice breezy and light even though her eyes never seemed to quite meet his. Her eyes only flickered to him briefly, as she was licking the remnants of his come off her palm, and she savored the taste of it as if she would never taste anything like it again. “It’s that time of month, ‘s all. Don’t wanna mess up your sheets.”

He reached out to her again. “Well now, wouldn’t be the first time I helped you through that -”

Tess moved off the bed. “Don’t worry about it.”

And now, it made sense. 

“Tess,” he says gently one night, hands a warm, solid weight on her shoulders. The edge of his thumb brushes the healed, red ridges of the bite, and Tess pulls her head away just enough for his hands to slide off her. “Tessa, it’ll be alright. It’s not gonna infect me -”

“How do you know?” she asks him sharply, spinning on her heels to face him. Her eyes cut into his face, mouth pressed into a hard line as she stares him down, challenging and hopeful and defiant all the same. “Jesus, Joel, you get infected by just breathing that shit in, who knows what the hell it’s gonna do to you if it’s bodily fluids -”

Joel shakes his head incredulously. “It doesn’t work like that, Tess. You don’t spread spores through spit and come -”

“Yes, you do,” she says coldly, and Joel feels the reproach dig into his chest. “It spreads through  _ bites _ , Joel. Saliva. Blood. Any way it can get into the bloodstream. That’s what FEDRA says, right?  _ Any bodily fluid _ .”

He tries to will himself to understand; she’s been alone too long, looking out for herself, counting down the days till when she’d wake up and become something less than human. He knows it the same in the way Ellie sometimes traces her own fingers over her bite, in the way she looked horrified at her own temper at times. He moves to her slowly, holds his hands out in front of her and reaches to brush his fingers over the skin of her arm. 

“Joel -”

“So say it’s true,” he says carefully, gripping her just firmly enough to keep Tess from pulling out of his grip again. He tugs her gently into his arms, feels her hands fist into his shirt as she presses her face into the cotton of his shirt and feels the weight of her breath on his chest. “Say it does spread how you think it does. Then what? You’re not gonna ever let me touch you again?”

Tess sighs. “Joel…” She pushes away from his chest, but his arms are wound tight around her, keeping her in place. She looks up at him seriously, exasperation and helpless surrender marring the lines of her furrowed brow. “It’s better that way, alright? I can’t -” she shakes her head, looks somewhere just left of his shoulder. “I can’t risk it.”

He slips his hands over her hips in soothing motions, circling and squeezing and pulling her as close to him as she’ll allow; as if somehow he can pull her from her own mind by sheer proximity. 

He used to be able to. 

“I can still touch you,” he murmurs quietly, nosing gently into the soft red-brown of her hair. Breathes her in and still finds that smell - something always citrus, something always soft and sweet. Something always Tess. “Won’t hafta - be inside you to make you feel good, right?” He squeezes her hips fondly, pressing a rasping little kiss along the shell of her ear. “You liked my hands well enough back then -”

She jerks away from him suddenly, recoils as if he’d pressed blazing metal to her skin. 

“I’m being  _ serious _ , Joel,” she says sharply, curving her arms around herself, her back to him once more. “That shit’s gotta stop, alright?”

He moves in a surge of frustration, indignation, and a touch of anger at her, but when she looks at him, she only sees his face open and hurt and helpless. “So what? I gotta face the fact that you're never gonna let me touch you again? No kisses, no touches, nothin' - with fuckin'  _ body fluids _ , right? Can't even fuckin' kiss you good morning or I'll end up sproutin' shit outta my head -"

"Don't.” She whirls on him, eyes flashing wide and hard into his face. Her hand trembles as she raises it, grabs a fistful of his shirt like she wants to pull him close and shove him away. She does the latter. “Don't you  _ fucking _ joke about that."

He lets himself be moved a half-step before he’s surging forward again, jaw clenched tight and lips curled. “I look like I’m fuckin’ gigglin’ right now?”

Tess presses her lips together too, bites down hard to grind her molars together. “I am  _ not  _ turnin’ you into one of those  _ things _ .”

He feels the last of his patience fraying, snapping. “Fine!” he shouts, spinning viciously on his heels. “That’s how you want it,  _ fine _ . You don’t put your hands on me, and I don’t put mine on you.”

“Joel -”

“Always been your way or the highway, right Tess?” He reaches for the door, nearly yanks it off its hinges. “Even between the sheets.”

“Joel,  _ please _ -”

She reaches out to touch him, fingers digging into his shoulder, and Joel jerks his body away from her.

“Goodnight, Tess,” he says.


	2. all good things

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Joel broods

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I said it was a 2-parter and I lied. I always lie.

He doesn’t remember the last time he’s sat out with his brother like this. 

Perched on the stoop of the back porch, nursing recycled bottles of homebrew that sits like hot acid in the back of his throat. He’s been here for - what was it? Eight? Nine months? - almost a year; too caught up in making a life for him and Ellie, too caught up in trying to forget that he went to bed every night feeling a hollow ache in his chest when he’d reach out across the bed and touch only cool sheets. 

There hasn’t been a quiet moment to catch up with Tommy. He honestly doesn’t think he wanted to. 

But here he is.

Joel lets out a breath through his nose, picking at the remnants of paper glue crusted over on the curve of his bottle. Tommy’s watching him from the corner of his eye, leaning back to take a swig of his homebrew, smacking his lips together pointedly. 

“Well,” Tommy begins. “Tess is some woman, ain’t she?”

That almost makes him laugh, and as it stands, Joel gives his brother a dry little chortle. They knew enough of Tess to know just how much of “some woman” she can be - years of it, down into the grit of Boston, when they were building into their empire underground. A lady with her eyes set on the prize; her way or the highway kind of woman, always ready with a bullet more than she was with a kiss. 

(Kisses, he’d later learned, were saved for cold nights submerged in the fumes of scotch and blood loss.)

Tommy looks at his brother head on, gently. “You wanna....tell me what y’all’re fightin’ about?” he asks. The delicate nature of his words almost makes Joel bristle; he doesn’t need coddling. Especially not from his younger brother. 

“Who says we’re fightin’?” Joel grunts.

Tommy gives him a long look, and Joel sighs. He doesn’t want to be the one to look away first, but at this point he’s just so tired of looking into people’s eyes and seeing something like  _ sympathy  _ there; compassion and empathy like he’d come to the town a widower in deep mourning. 

And yet - Tess is here. Alive. Breathing. As close to him as he could have hoped for, and yet still so far away. 

Tommy sucks in a breath between his teeth, puffing out a breath as he swirls the liquor in his hand, peering into the amber bottle thoughtfully. “Thought you’d be holed up in the house with her for a while,” he told Joel. “Figured you mighta wanted to….reconnect some.”

He looks at Joel, and it’s like he knows. 

“Only woman who can put that look on your face is Tess. Only time I’ve seen ya look like this is when she don’t let you in her bed -”

He wants to be offended; their relationship isn’t wholly physical, he isn’t such a shallow son of a bitch that all he ever wants from her is some tail. But the more time he has to think about it, the more Joel thinks that there’s nothing  _ wrong _ with needing the physical. They didn’t talk much, Tess and him. They keep their words to a minimum and did their talking with their bodies when they needed to get the message across. Whether the message was breaking bones, spilling blood, taking lives, or kissing to hurt and touching to heal - it was all relative.

It isn’t always the best way to deal with things, but they’ve never  _ needed  _ words.

Looks, yes. Touches. They’re good at reading each other without the white noise between them. One look from Tess and he’d know to watch her six, or tank ahead, or take left and she take right. 

He used to, at least.

All he sees in her face now is resentment.

He scrubs a weary hand over his face, digging his nails into the depths of his beard to feel that tugging bite of hair roots being pulled. “You don’t know the half of it, lil’ brother.” It should’ve been a warning, a threat to his brother to keep his mouth shut, but all he can hear is the defeat. “She’s….she thinks she’s gonna infect me. If we - even if I just kissed her.”

Tommy blinks, and Joel sighs again as he turns his eyes out into the dark yonder of the horizon. “She says that that’s what FEDRA says, right? Spores spread through body fluids.” He lets out a bitter little laugh, shaking his head slowly as his grip on the beer bottle tightens. “Says I’m gonna sprout shit outta my head if I so much as hold her to sleep -”

“Well,” Tommy says carefully, tilting his head down to look at the hard lines of his brother’s face; the stone set of his eyes. “There’s no way of knowin’, right? For all you know, she might be right.”

Joel presses his lips together hard, and his features pinch in annoyance when he looks at Tommy. “Think I don’t know that?”

“So why’re y’all so torn up -”

“I’m torn up,” Joel grits, setting his bottle aside with a little too much force. “Because she shows up on our doorstep like a ghost. Been almost - what, two years? Three? Since I left Boston and now - she doesn’t even wanna talk about it. Won’t ever let me get a word in, edgewise. Says it’s for the better.” He shakes his head - she’s right, she’s always right, but didn’t he still get a say? 

The stoop creaks beneath him as Tommy pushes himself to his feet. Joel feels the heavy weight of Tommy’s hand clapped over his shoulder, and he looks up sullenly at his younger brother.

Tommy gives his shoulder a soft squeeze. “It’s tough,” he tells Joel, shrugging his shoulders. “Not bein’ able to touch the woman you love like that. I’m sure as hell that it’d kill me a little inside if I knew I couldn’t kiss my wife good morning - can’t ever hold her hand.” Joel looks at him incredulously, seems about ready to open his mouth and tell him that he sure as fuck ain’t helping, but Tommy continues.

“But...if it meant that I had her with me; beside me, alive? Livin’, breathin’, safer than I coulda ever imagined?” He shrugs his shoulders a little helplessly. “I’d count my blessings each and every night.”

Joel runs a frustrated hand through his hair. “Jesus, Tommy, you don’t think I thoughta all that?” He pushes himself off the porch as well, shrugs his brother’s hand off his shoulder to pace the length of the backyard. 

Moving helps; moving keeps his mind from festering. 

It makes him feel like an  _ asshole  _ \- why couldn’t he just be happy that she was here? It’s more than anything he could’ve hoped for, and Joel knows deep down, that having her by him is more than enough already; more than he deserves, but to imagine her so close, and to still be so untouchable puts a roiling, aching twist in his gut.

“I just -” he shakes his head, his voice clouding into a low, gruff rumble. “I had to leave her. She died lyin’ in her own blood, and I had to -”

He looks away, swallows hard to push down the bile brimming in the back of his throat. “I lost her once,” he croaks finally, his eyes gleaming and hard on his brother’s face. “I ain’t losin’ her again. Not without a damn fight.”

“Maybe you oughta talk to her,” Tommy offers. “Without yellin’. Or hollerin’. Or slammin’ doors and stompin’ outta the house -”

Joel glares at him. 

“Just a suggestion,” Tommy says, smirking slightly before sobering into a serious frown. “Shit, Joel, you think I don’t know how much she’s got a hold on you? Might not’ve always seen eye to eye with her about the way she runs her business, but I’m not blind.” His eyes glaze over for a thoughtful moment, and then soften when he looks at Joel, a knowing smile on his face as he climbs the steps of the porch. “Maybe y’all need to remember.”

Joel frowns at his brother’s back. “Remember what?”

“What it was like before.”

He watches his brother disappear back into the house, frowning in confusion as he mulls over Tommy’s words. What was it like before? Before the Outbreak? Before things went to hell and Sarah and Texas? Before in Boston? Before Ellie and the Fireflies and into a time when he’d only recently “retired” from his Hunter ways; when things were hard and they were little more than hired guns to Tess? Before he learned to read her words, her face, her touches; before he learned that Tess had crept into the crevices of his mind the same way he’d crept into hers? 

Before the sex? Before the nights of winter storms and no power and only a bottle of liquor to keep them warm? Before the adrenaline and blood and the kisses that cut into his skin that bruised for the week?

Before leaving her dead on the floor of the Capitol building.

The bottle shatters on the ground beside him, pooling murky around his feet, and Joel stares down at the gathering froth beneath him. Swirling, bitter, directionless chaos; meaningless, and all because he’d slipped up. 

His boot scrapes against gravel as he moves his foot away from the puddle, up the steps and into the house. Once more, leaving behind chaos that he could’ve prevented.

\-----

The kitchen light is still on when he shuffles in through the back door. Bear gives him an affable bark as he steps through the threshold, and Joel gives the giant mutt a heavy-handed pet before pausing by the counter.

Ellie stares back at him sheepishly. “Hey.”

He nods his head slowly. “Hi.” 

He gestures to the rustic, homemade biscuit in front of her, sitting on finer china than he could ever remember being able to afford owning. “‘s pretty late for a snack.”

She shrugs, picking around the crusty edges of the biscuit. “Tess made some for dinner.” It isn’t so much of an accusation as it is a very gentle needling. The teen jerks her head at the fridge. “Think she left some for you.”

Joel doesn’t think he can stomach anything with the roiling bile in his gut, fizzing up into his throat the same way his heart pounds guiltily. “Maybe tomorrow.” He strains to hear signs of anyone else in the house; footsteps or creaking from upstairs, the shift of weight on loose floorboards or the sound of water running. 

Between the sounds of Bear’s panting breaths and Ellie’s fork against delicate ceramic, he hears…silence. The radio sort that almost blends into the sounds of the cicadas and crickets and frogs warbling outside. 

Ellie’s voice startles him in the quiet. “She went out for a walk.”

He frowns. “She shouldn’t go off on her own like that. ‘s so late, too -”

The look Ellie gives him is enough for Joel to bite his tongue. He doesn’t think to press the issue, only leans his hands on the counter and grips the edges. “Ellie…” He chews the words in his mouth, considering them carefully as Ellie peers up at him expectantly, almost hopefully. 

“When you got -” he clears his throat. “After you were bit,” he croaks, glancing at her apologetically. “Did ya - were ya scared about…touching other people? Just ‘n case you -” he gestures between them a little helplessly. 

The girl’s face softens into understanding, pushing herself upright and folding her arms to lean against the counter with. “I was,” she says, tilting her head slightly. “Still am, actually. I don’t know if one day I might still end up going crazy and bursting spores outta my guts.” She rubs her hands along her arms and shrugs, giving Joel a disparaging smile as the man digests her words. 

“I think you need to talk to her,” she says softly. “She came all this way. For you.”

_ For you _ .  _ She came all this way for you _ . 

He looks away, mumbling a sound from his chest as he glances down at the dog sitting obediently by his feet. He nudges Bear’s rump gently with his boot, mouth set in a thin line when Bear turns around, tail wagging. “You take Bear out yet?”

He knows she’s rolling her eyes at him. “Not yet,” Ellie says. “He was waiting for the alpha dog to take him out.”

Joel squints at her as she hops off the stool, heaving a deep sigh as he stares back down to where Bear is sitting up straighter, eyes bright and tail thumping against the stained and cracked linoleum. He sighs again, unfolding his arms.

“Alright, mutt. Let’s go for a walk.”

 

He takes the dog out around the neighborhood with no real thought of where his feet take him. He’s not focusing on the way Bear’s threading in and out of bushes; pausing to snuffle around particularly interesting clump of weed, or to mark a trail of yellow over flower petals. Joel ambles along after him, kicking stones and scuffing the soles of his boots against cracking asphalt and crumbling concrete. His eyes, though, scan the streets and leaning buildings for a flash of blue bandana, the silhouette of a face he’s memorized into the beat of his heart.

The world rustles around him, but there is no comfort in the familiarity of the space anymore. Everything to him is suddenly alien -- a warped reality of a world not possible, and yet he stands, grounded on the asphalt, shaken to his core.

_ I woulda stayed. I woulda stayed for you. _

By the time Bear’s ready to circle back, Joel finds his shoulders slumping lower in defeat.

\--------- 

He finds no comfort in sleep the rest of the night. Much of it, he spends pacing the length of his bedroom, waiting; hoping that at some point in the dark he would hear the quiet padding of her footsteps on the hardwood, that he would hear the creak of the door and see the hallway light spill into the room with her. 

He paces, and waits, and Tess never comes through the door. 

At the edge of dawn, he steps out into the hallway. 

She’s curled up on the battered old couch in the living room, huddled under one of the ratty throws they’d scavenged up months back. One arm tucked under her head for a pillow, and the way her neck is craned and crammed into the edges of the couch’s arm, he knows that it’s nothing more than a punishment to herself. 

“Tessa.”

He reaches down to touch her gently, skirts his fingers along the frayed edges of her shirt. It takes a moment for him to remember how best to wake her - it takes him even longer to remember how best to even speak to her. Joel kneels carefully by the couch, one hand cupping the curve of her unmarred shoulder, and in the cool blue light of the day spreading across the room, he sees the line and curve of her cheekbone, the dark spread of her lashes over freckles. Her brows furrow even in sleep now; he remembers once like a distant dream the smoothness of her face at rest, when she used to be curled into his arms for warmth in the dingy Boston apartment. 

She wakes with a violent wrench of her shoulder from his grip, her eyes snapping open so suddenly Joel can’t help the way he steps back. “‘s okay,” he says quietly, holding a hand out soothingly. “It’s just me.”

Her eyes soften with recognition for a brief moment, before he sees the hardened walls building back up behind her sleep-heavy eyes. “What’re you doin’ up? ‘s late.”

“Yeah well, call it a luxury if you want,” Joel begins, easing himself back onto a knee by the couch once more. His eyes are soft, warm and searching even if they are guarded from the years of hard living and mourning. “But I never did get used to sleepin’ alone in a bed so big.”

She arches a brow at him, and for a glimmer of a second he sees the same Tess he’d left behind in Boston. “You plan on keepin’ your hands to yourself then?” Her tone is teasing and wry, but he knows the guarded look in her eyes.

They’ve never been good with saying sorry. He doesn’t suppose they’re going to start now.

He reaches out tentatively, encompasses her slender hand in his. Her skin is cool to the touch, and it only makes him cling that much tighter. Out of habit, pulled from a forgotten part of his mind, he lifts her hand to his lips, and kisses her palm.

“Was thinkin’ that maybe you and I could talk,” he murmurs, squeezing her fingers between his. “Just...talk.”

Tess’s eyes flicker briefly, a soft furrow in her brows as she watches his face, peers through the open, honest searching in his eyes for hers. She’s not used to this Joel; feels herself wanting to pull her hand from his grip, her muscles gathering to pull back, but he clings to her steadily. Holds her in place, to keep her from drifting. 

Eventually she sighs. “Just talk,” she says, glancing at him sharply.

Joel nods seriously, hands slipping over her arms as easy as breathing. He pulls her up from the couch. “We haven’t talked in awhile. Figure it’s time we both catch up and - set the records straight.”

There’s a flicker of fear on her face, and it makes Joel’s gut roil to remember the last time he’d seen her that scared. 

She bites her lip. “Okay,” she whispers. “We’ll talk.”

He twines his fingers with hers. “‘s all I want.”


End file.
